“Nothing in this order restrains news, review, criticism, commentary, satire, parody, caricature or fan expression.”
That sentence, from Justice Purushaindra Kumar Kaurav of the Delhi High Court, is the most important thing written about personality rights in India this year. It appears in an order for Kriti Sanon dated 29 October, reported on 4 November, and it is the first time a judge in this wave has put a free-expression limit on the face of the order rather than leaving it to be argued about later.
He also refused most of what she asked for.
What happened
The case is Kriti Sanon v BBE Marketing Inc & Ors, CS(COMM) 1132/2026. Bar and Bench, LiveLawBiz and LawChakra all have it, and they agree on the detail.
She sued across five categories: fake booking offers, impersonating accounts, AI and morphed images including merchandise, chatbots and synthetic voice models, and pornographic deepfakes. She asked for one injunction covering the lot.
The Court granted the narrow part. Sexually explicit AI-generated and morphed images, impersonating accounts, synthetic voice models and chatbots presented as her, and the specific merchandise on record, are restrained. Intermediaries must disable identified URLs within the Rule 3(1)(d) timeline under the IT Rules, government defendants must issue blocking directions, and intermediaries must hand over basic subscriber information and IP logs within three weeks.
It refused the omnibus relief. The merchandise question beyond what is on record is expressly reserved. Listed again for 10 December.
And unlike almost every order we have covered in this wave, defendants actually turned up and argued.
The reasoning, which is the point
Our 14 October piece is here. On 14 October we wrote that Indian courts had built a new property right in a famous person’s identity out of proceedings where nobody contested anything, and that the one judge who had paused to ask what the right actually covered was Justice Kaurav, in this case. He has now answered, and the answer is a rebuke to the shape of the wave he was part of.
“All the claims in a suit of this kind cannot be put under one umbrella and met with one omnibus injunction.”
“Before deciding what deserves protection, the Court must ask what right is said to be infringed.”
Personality rights, he held, are not a single cause of action at all. They are a bundle of distinct claims in publicity, privacy, passing off, defamation and statutory intellectual property, each with its own ingredients and its own limits. A deepfake pornographic video and an unlicensed T-shirt are not the same legal wrong and should not get the same order.
He described the uncertainty as being “of law as much as of fact”, which is a judge saying out loud that the law here is unsettled rather than pretending otherwise.
And then the line that will matter most in five years: “The rights are available to every individual.”
Every order before this one grounded the right in the plaintiff’s fame. Kangana Ranaut’s stature “inherently grants her proprietary rights over her personality”. Vijay Deverakonda’s likewise. That framing makes identity protection a privilege of celebrity, which is exactly backwards, since the person least able to get a deepfake taken down is someone nobody has heard of. Kaurav has put it the other way round.
Two more things in this order worth keeping
Intermediaries are “parties for compliance, not wrongdoers”. That is a small phrase with real consequences. Meta, Google and X keep being named as defendants in suits where nobody alleges they created anything. Saying plainly that they are in the case to execute a direction, not to answer for the harm, is both fairer and more honest about what these orders are for.
And the carve-out. News, review, criticism, commentary, satire, parody, caricature, fan expression. Named, in the order, unprompted.
We flagged on 14 October that nobody had yet dealt with what this right does to journalism, cartooning, mimicry or fan edits, because the only defendants were deepfake sites that do not file replies. A judge has now dealt with it before being forced to.
The same week, the same instinct
This is not an isolated judge. On the same day, 29 October, Justice Tejas Karia in the Sourav Ganguly suit over Doosra asked Ganguly to file a table of timestamps identifying exactly which portions of the film he objected to and why, said the court would watch the film over the weekend, and floated licensing, deletion, muting or a disclaimer as alternatives. His line: “We can’t just say the entire movie has to be blocked. That’s not possible at this stage.” We wrote about that case on 23 October.
Two Delhi judges, one day, both refusing to treat a personality rights claim as a request that gets granted. Both demanding specificity. Both looking for the narrowest remedy that works rather than the broadest one available.
Meanwhile the pipeline keeps filling. On 3 November Justice Madhav Jamdar of the Bombay High Court ordered takedowns in Sukhvinder Kaur’s suit against Google, holding that “her right to live with dignity has been breached”. The same day, Rupali Ganguly filed her own personality rights plaint in Bombay over deepfakes and morphed clips. We have found no order on that yet, so nobody should report that she has protection.
Bengaluru Baath Take
Three weeks ago we said a new property right in a person’s identity was being created in a room where only one side ever spoke, and that somebody needed to put the opposing case. We did not expect the court to do it itself.
What Kaurav has written is close to the right answer. The harms are real and the narrow injunction against sexual deepfakes and impersonation should have been granted and was. The sprawl was not, because an injunction that covers everything covers things nobody has thought about, and the things nobody has thought about in this country are usually journalism and jokes.
Two cautions before anyone declares the matter settled. This is an interim order, expressly prima facie, and he says so. And a carve-out written by one judge in one order is a good precedent, not a rule: the next plaintiff will ask for the omnibus version from a different bench, and may well get it.
But for a publication that writes critically about famous people for a living, the single most reassuring sentence published by an Indian court this year arrived on 4 November, and it was not written for us. It was written anyway.
Sources
- Bar and Bench: Delhi High Court protects Kriti Sanon’s personality rights
- LiveLawBiz: the order, with case number and citation
- LawChakra: Kriti Sanon personality rights
- LiveLawBiz: Delhi HC asks Ganguly to identify objectionable scenes in Doosra
- LiveLaw: Bombay HC takedown order, 3 November
- LiveLaw: Rupali Ganguly moves Bombay High Court
